Shashi Tharoor: Nehru: A BiographyAs a young Indian child growing up in America, I heard stories about India's independence movement from my parents. I was told about Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister of India. I had trouble believing that a single individual could have so much impact on the world. After reading, Shashi Tharoor's book, I've changed my mind.
Tharoor's analysis of the intertwining between an individual's biography and the birth of a nation is masterful. The book stays close to its subject, Nehru, but then ventures to link his biography to many of the Indian institutions we now take for granted, including: secularism, democracy, non-alignment, and the country's prowess in science and math. This is a highly readable book and I strongly recommend it to any reader interested in learning about India, its culture, and its first leader.

Mary Douglas: How Institutions ThinkThis book will re-wire your mind. If you ever believed that what we take for reality is mostly a projected societal consensus rather than objective fact, read this book. In addition to being a first-class theorist who can identify critical mechanisms for the social construction of reality, she is fantastic writer. I couldn't sleep for days after reading this book.

August 26, 2003

Platform: A Novel

I just read Michel Houellebecq's Platform: A Novel It is a depressing book, but I couldn't put it down. I started reading it at about 6:00 p.m. last Friday and finished it at 2:30 a.m. In between I had dinner with my family, gave the kids a bath, and put my youngest to sleep for the night. The gist of the novel is that contemporary Western life has numbed us from feeling passion and achieving truly authentic relationships between men and women. The culture of materialism, pornography, consumerism, and secularism penetrating almost every dimension of our life profanes that which was once sacred. Think about it. It is difficult to find one aspect of life--family, religious institution, community--which is not in some way not influenced by money, either lamenting the lack off or moaning the excess of. The irony is that many of our politicians who opportunistically preach the virutes of the family or other sacred institutions do little to support them. As a result, like Michel Renault, the novel's protagonist, the empty void that used to be filled by community and family, remains unfilled. It is obvious that Houellebecq has read quite a bit of sociology. He freely quotes from Auguste Comte and makes many unattributed illusionsto Emile Durkheim, especially The Division of Labor in Society. One thing about the French is that they are pretty well-versed in sociology. You've got to respect a country that recognizes that the social group, not the individual is what creates meaning.